My late mother worked briefly at the United Nations in the 1950s. Her contacts there got in touch with her after she had moved to Tennessee to tell her that a Soviet delegation was visiting Nashville (late 1960s, perhaps) and instructing her to give them a driving tour of the city.
They wanted to see slums and only slums. She took them to the worst parts of Nashville, Jo Johnston projects, and others like it, and the Soviets were outraged that she was showing them only middle class housing. They wanted to see where the truly poor lived. She could not convince them that this was as bad as it got.
Good post!
I read once that the Soviet authorities decided to show “The Grapes of Wrath” in the Soviet Union, wanting their people to see how poor and downtrodden people were in the US. Instead what people noticed was that the destitute Joad family owned their own car.